Life Evolving From Non-life is Contrary to the Known Laws of the Universe

By Brannon S. Howse

Life evolving from non-life is contrary to the known laws of the universe. True.

An evolutionist has to believe in the mathematical improbability that something has come from nothing. The argument goes that, given enough time, anything can happen. There is no logical reason to make that assumption, however. Nothing in our experience or any scientific inquiry suggests there can exist any effect without an associated cause. No amount of time factored into the equation can be shown to change that. Famed astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle once set about to determine the probability that something—anything whatsoever—could come about completely at random. His conclusion is best expressed by an entertaining and mind-boggling analogy. “He “compares
it to lining up 1050 (ten with fifty zeros after it) blind people, giving each one a scrambled Rubik’s Cube, and finding that they all solve the cube at the same moment.”49 Just so you’ll be sure to grasp the magnitude of Hoyle’s statement: Note that the number 1 billion has only nine zeros after it—Hoyle’s number has fifty!

And Hoyle isn’t alone in his musings. Dr. Walter T. Brown offers this assessment: “The simplest conceivable form of life should have at least 600 different protein molecules. The mathematical probability that just one molecule could form by the chance arrangement of the proper sequence of amino acids is far less than 1 in 10450 (The magnitude of the number 10450 can begin to be appreciated by realizing that the visible universe is about 1028 inches in diameter).”50

To put these numbers in perspective, it is instructive to note that, according to mathematics—Borel’s Single Law of Chance, to be specific—when the odds of any event occurring are less than 1 in 1050, it is considered to be “impossible.”51

Even some who are not specifically creationists question Darwinian evolution. Molecular biologist Michael Denton explains the complexity of a cell and the absolute zero probability that it could come into being without an intelligent designer:

Perhaps in no other area of modern biology is the challenge posed by the extreme complexity and ingenuity of biological adaptations more apparent than in the fascinating new molecular world of the cell. . . . To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which—a functional protein or gene—is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man? Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artifacts appear clumsy. . . . It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate.52

The mathematical impossibility of the universe simply “occurring” reveals just how silly it is for anyone to believe in Darwinian evolution. Nevertheless, naturalistic evolutionists would have us believe everything happened by random spontaneity—life chanced to come about from non-life; matter came into existence from nothing.

Right.

Sidestepping Cause and Effect

Evolutionists believe that something which had a beginning—i.e., the cosmos—had no cause. Hmm. But what about that basic, universally accepted principle of physics known“as “the law of cause and effect”? It’s the inconvenient reality that everything which has a beginning has to have a cause. If a baseball zings past your head, you know it did not just spontaneously begin moving along that trajectory by itself. The baseball and its motion had a cause—someone either picked up the ball and threw it or slapped it your way with a bat. 

The world works that way, but there’s reason to believe God doesn’t. He did not need a cause because He had no beginning. He always was (see John 1:1). Of course, a critic may say, “Well, you claim God has always been here, but perhaps it’s actually the world that has always existed, and there is no God.” In this debate, though, science is once again our ally. The world is not eternal, as the First Law and Second Law of Thermodynamics prove. 

A Matter of Mind

Corliss Lamont, author of The Philosophy of Humanism, says humanism “considers all forms of the supernatural as myth.”53 Lamont goes on to proclaim that “the cosmos, in the individualized form of human beings giving rein to their imagination, created the gods.”54 What this necessarily implies is that matter—benign, unthinking stuff—came before and gave rise to minds capable of “creating the gods.” Think about this for a minute. What the atheist/evolutionist is saying is that mere substances created smart things that ponder the universe—non-intelligence created intelligence. An evolutionist must believe intelligence grows out of non-intelligence because matter preceded mind. Again, does that stack up against what is observable about the world? Hardly. We always see intelligence as the generator of order—of things—not the other way around. 

Is it really plausible that out of a primordial soup, a random process of impossibility erupted from the slime and happened to create eyes, ears, and brains? Spontaneous generation says one system can evolve into another, increasing along the way in information needed to become a more complex structure, but Dr. Walter Brown describes why spontaneous generation is absurd:

All isolated systems contain a fixed amount of information. No isolated, non-trivial system has ever been observed to spontaneously increase its information content. Natural processes without exception destroy information. Only outside intelligence can increase the information content of an isolated system. Since all scientific observations are consistent with this generalization, it could be called “The Law of Intelligence.” This law has three corollaries or consequences: (a) Macroevolution cannot occur, (b) Outside intelligence was involved in the creation of the universe and the creation of all forms of life, (c) A “big bang” cannot precede life.55

Intelligence coming from non-intelligence is just one more of the many unscientific, mathematically impossible things in which an evolutionist has to have faith. Christians, on the other hand, believe the mind proceeded matter—the mind of God created matter.

Copyright 2006 ©Brannon Howse. This content is for Situation Room members and is not to be duplicated in any form or uploaded to other websites without the express written permission of Brannon Howse or his legally authorized representative.